Writing about the food, farmers, fishermen, and folk of Long Island's North Fork.

June 2015

06/24/2015

Paul Shepherd has lived on Shelter Island his entire adult life, but his early childhood in Missouri, the “Show Me State” left a mark on him.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on May 21, 2015

Paul Shepherd likes to question authority. He calls himself a non-conformist, a one-time rebel, and prior to his election to Shelter Island Town Board in 2011, an outspoken critic of local government. Since becoming one of four councilmen, who along with the Town Supervisor make up the Board, he respects his fellow lawmakers he said, but often disagrees with them. Publicly, and vociferously.

Born in West Plains, Missouri in 1955, Paul left as a kid, but is quick to give the “Show Me State” credit for his temperament. ”It really stuck,” he said. “Just the way I am. I take nothing for granted.”

Paul’s mother Edith left Missouri, and her husband, for Shelter Island around the time of Paul’s third birthday. “She did whatever she had to do to get free and to protect me,” Paul said. He grew up with his older brothers, Jim, who now lives in Muscatine, Iowa and Gene who still lives on Shelter Island. His younger sister, Edith passed away in 2014.

“My mother was a rebel as well. A single mother in the 50s,” Paul said. “She and I had a tempestuous relationship.” He went to the Shelter Island School until he hit the pre-teen years. Then Edith sent Paul to follow his brothers at Bob Jones Academy, a strict, religious, “socially restrictive” school in South Carolina known for establishing discipline in the unruly. His dorm room housed five boys, included a double bunk, a triple bunk, and a prayer captain.

“I did well my first couple of years,” Paul said, “ But being somewhat naturally rebellious, I became too challenging for them to retain, so they requested that I not join them again. I wasn’t crazy about the authoritarian nature of things.”

He finished high school on Shelter Island, spent a couple of years at Florida Southern University studying horticulture, and dropped out because, “I was wasting my time and my money.” He came home in 1973 to work in landscaping, and later made the switch to carpentering. “I learned as I went, more from some than from others,” he said.

For eight years he worked with general contractors building homes and additions. In 1988, he went solo, determined to get new business by word of mouth, rather than advertising, and not “be a big-shot,” he said, because “I figured they paid a terrible price in terms of government oversight.” Since then, he has had steady work as a carpenter, and continued solo.

“I’m a day to day person,” Paul said. “My mom had higher hopes for me.”

Edith Shepherd worked for the Town as secretary for the planning board for many years, and died in 2007. “She did not live to see me on Town Council, she would have liked that,” said Paul.

Growing up without a father in the picture, Paul said he learned to do things on his own. “That’s the kind of thing that yields some rebelliousness,” he said. “Nobody told me what to do.”

Appropriately for a man who takes a dim view of laws, his partner of 37 years has been Jean Lawless. “We’ve been not-married a lot longer than most people have been married,“ said Paul.

Jean and Paul met when, acting on “word of mouth at a bar,” he went to tryouts for a new production of the Shelter Island Players. Although they lived across the road from each other, they hadn’t really met until they were cast as Pierre and the Ragpicker in “The Madwoman of Chaillot.” Jean has two children, and four grandchildren, Desmond, Milo, Ophelia, and Dutch.

Paul remembers Shelter Island in the 60’s and 70’s as a place decidedly more forested, less developed and more blue-collar than today. “Wintertime was a serious business here,” he said. Scalloping and fishing was a livelihood for many men, and “there was no overpopulation of deer, because deer was dinner.”

There was, said Paul, a lot of drinking. He reeled off the names of some of the local “gin mills” open year round in the 70s; The Candlelight, The Harbor Inn, The Pub, The Dory, The Chequit. “I quit in 1990. The party was over and it was time to go home,” he said. “I was never, ever the one to leave the party first.”

By today’s standards said Paul, local enforcement of laws against drunk driving on “The Rock” in the 70’s was more relaxed. Today, the separation between law enforcement and the people they protect is greater, he said, partly because of litigation. “There is more of a divide now. The stakes are higher — if you let someone go [without a ticket] and they go on and hurt someone. I don’t say that it is wrong. But it is what happened.”

In 2009 Paul, still a steadfast questioner of authority, made an unsuccessful run for Town Supervisor, as the Local Liberties candidate, a party name he made up when officials in Riverhead insisted he list a party affiliation. Subsequently he mounted a successful bid for a Town Board seat in 2011. “I never wanted to be someone who makes laws, because I don’t care for them,” he said. “You really want power in the hands of people who don’t want it so much.”

Now that he has crossed over to the law-making side of local politics, Paul says his perspective has shifted a bit as well. “An informed opinion is sometimes a softer one. I still have to be part of it. Otherwise I would be isolated, and what is the point of that?” Referring to his four colleagues on the Town Board, he said, “I’m in a bit of a marriage with these people.”

Prior to his election to Town Board, Paul was a vocal critic of local government, often airing his opinions in letters printed in the Reporter. “ If I have been quiet of late it’s because I have a job to do. That’s one of vexing things about it.”

“I tend to speak my mind,” he said. “My mind is a free-range animal.”

Lightning Round- Paul Shepherd

What do you always have with you?

“My pens, so I can make notes if something comes up.”

Favorite place on Shelter Island?

“Sachem’s Woods It’s got a good feel. I walk through every other day with my dog.”

Favorite place not on Shelter Island?

“Any place is as good as another. I have not left New York in 15 years.”

Favorite book?

“The Lord of the Rings Series. Tolkien had a strong sense of how to set up the battle between good and evil. I am always attracted to the underdog.”

06/23/2015

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTOP.A.T. Hunt outside her Chase Creek home, a place where she finds ‘a sort of cosmic energy.’

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on June 18, 2015

Well-adjusted people are said to be comfortable in their own skins. P.A.T. Hunt wears hers with enviable freedom and confidence.

Since she came to Shelter Island in 1980 with her husband Bridg, Patricia Ann Thomas Hunt, who prefers to be called P.A.T., begot, reared and educated two Hareleggers. She also provided the spirit, determination and zeal behind the preservation and restoration of Taylor’s Island’s Smith-Taylor cabin, one of the Island’s most beautiful and quirky treasures.

P.A.T. was born and raised in Waterbury, Connecticut, a place she remembers as an ethnically diverse industrial town, on the Naugatuck River. “There was a lot of tumult in my family,” said P.A.T. “My parents were wonderful as far as not holding me back.”

She left after high school and was living in Boston in 1969 when she and her friend DeeDee decided to drive up to a music and art fair called Woodstock. “Music, peace and love, it sounded good to me,” P.A.T. said.

When the young women encountered abandoned vehicles lining the road, they decided they were close enough and walked, leaving their food and camping equipment in the car. Slowly realizing they were nowhere near their destination, they accepted a ride from a farmer who drove them part way. They arrived to find a mass of muddy, blissed-out humanity, were befriended by strangers and were able to spend the night outdoors comfortably. “I hadn’t ‘turned on’ yet,” P.A.T. said. “Not everybody can say they were straight at Woodstock.”

In her early 20s, P.A.T. acted on a dream to go to California. She found transportation through a Boston radio station’s ride board and set off cross-country in a van with a man named Dino, a conscientious objector named Wally and a couple who were only going as far as Wyoming.

P.A.T. and Wally made it to Northern California, where she discovered she’d need to hitchhike for two days to get to Huntington Beach where she planned to meet some friends. In retrospect, she admitted it was a poor decision.

“I thought life was about taking risks, but I hadn’t figured out yet that there are death-defying risks and life-affirming risks,” she said. “A woman hitch-hiking for two days alone is a little death-defying.”

The landscape of the California coast made a deep impression on her. “When I came back East, I really appreciated the beauty,” she said. “It was a contrast and it made me appreciate where I came from.”

In January of 1974, P.A.T. moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where she worked at the Hospital of St. Raphael in the Children’s Psychiatric Emergency Service.

At the Oxford Ale House in New Haven, P.A.T. met Bridg Hunt, a boat-builder from a place she had never heard of — Shelter Island. Their first date went well, but on the second date, “he wasn’t charming me,” she said. “My crazy roommate said, ‘Well you have to go out with him a third time because of the ‘finite entity theory.’” P.A.T. was pretty sure there was no such thing as the finite entity theory, but she went out with him one more time and that was the charm.

They married in Newport, Rhode Island and were soon living on a boat that Bridg had built at Tuthills Boatyard (now the Island Boatyard), a vessel that was their home for 11 years, even after the births of Selina and Martin in 1981 and 1985.

When Selina came along, the plan was to give birth on their boat at a neighbor’s dock. But when P.A.T. began labor at 6 o’clock on a falling tide, she and Bridg didn’t get away from their mooring fast enough to make it to the dock. Bridg attempted to dislodge the grounded boat by circling in a Whaler to churn up a wake, to no avail.

Finally, P.A.T. went ashore and Selina arrived at 1 o’clock in a room Bridg’s mother, Esther, had prepared in her Dering Harbor home.

P.A.T. said Helen Loper, Dering Harbor Village Clerk, stationed herself in front of the IGA heralding the news that a baby girl had been born in her village. Later, New York State officials balked at issuing a birth certificate, saying the proud parents had failed to answer all the questions on the form.

“We thought some of those questions were valid, but some of them were too Big Brotherish,” P.A.T. said. Helen intervened, telling the state bureaucrats, “They had their baby the old fashioned way, and they filled out their form the old fashioned way.”

During P.A.T.’s first autumn on the Island, she rode her bike to the A-frames that stood across from the Sylvester Manor Windmill Field to help open the mounds of scallops brought in by baymen. It was 1980, before algal blooms caused by water pollution clobbered the scallop population. “Bill Wilcox taught me how to open,” she said. “I had never been so connected to life. I knew this food would be on people’s plates that night. That’s real.”

A few years later she recalled, all that had changed. “People who were baymen, now they’re in the service industry,” P.A.T. said. “We lost a lot, our identity, our connection to the water.”

After home-birthing both children and raising them on a boat, home schooling seemed a natural choice. “Some people really narrow their children’s lives with home schooling,” said P.A.T. “Our aim was to blow it wide open.

People had different comfort levels with our lifestyle.”

To celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary, P.A.T. and Bridg went back to Newport and stayed inside the Rose Island Light House. “When the lighthouse went on, a light went on for me,” she said. “I said, ‘Imagine doing something like this with Taylor’s Island.’”

In 2005, Shelter Islanders had been debating the future of Taylor’s Island. This spit of land is a tombolo, or land accessible by foot only at low tide. Its derelict cabin and 360-degree views had been given to the town decades prior. The cabin was a historic jewel or a dangerous eyesore depending who you asked.

When P.A.T. was asked to co-chair the Taylor’s Island Preservation and Management Committee with Rich Surozenski, it became clear which way the tide around the tombolo would turn.

With her children launched, P.A.T. was looking for her next job. “There were a lot of things I could do, but the bar was set really high,” she said. “I felt like going from my nuclear family to my extended family, my community.”

Since then, P.A.T. has worked tirelessly to raise the community support and money to restore the cabin and make Taylor’s Island accessible to the public. “My work now is Taylor’s Island. If that had been torn down we’d have a spit of land with something fake on it,” she said. “The cabin is lovely, and it’s getting lovelier all the time.”

P.A.T. eagerly anticipates grandmother-hood come September when Selina and her husband expect their first child. Mother and daughter are not the only female members of the Hunt clan on tenterhooks to welcome this child.

“When Selina was planning her wedding, Esther reportedly told her granddaughter “If your wedding dress is a maternity dress, that would be O.K. with me.”

06/20/2015

The Shelter Island 10K course is known for its beauty, but could just as well be known for the history it traverses. The 6.2-mile route takes in bucolic views, briny wafts of sea breeze, and historical sites that predate the arrival of Europeans; and I’m not talking about the runners who came from Belgium and Rome last year. Here is a guide to the Shelter Island 10K course, with points historical as well as topographical.

At the starting line, the Shelter Island Presbyterian Church is just ahead on the left. Established in 1743, the original building burned and was replaced in 1934. What would those 18th century Presbyterians have made of 3000 scantily clad men and women thundering past the church on a Saturday evening?

The Manhanset Chapel in 1891 Photo courtesy of the Shelter Island Historical Society

Just past the Church on the left at .1-mile is the Manhanset Chapel, built in 1890 as part of the Manhanset Hotel, another historical site that the 10K passes at about the halfway point of the race. The Chapel was moved to this location when the rest of the hotel was destroyed by fire.

The race route heads out of the center of town, with a sharp left onto St. Mary’s Road and continues with a slight but steady uphill to St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on the right at .6-mile. The original church, “a simple box with a steeple” was built in 1873, and burned to the ground in 1892 after a lightning strike. The current church was built in 1893 in a Gothic Revival style.

The route passes through one of Shelter Islands’ two traffic circles, and continues on a gradual uphill to point 1.3 miles into the race. On the right at the crest of the hill is a small red house, 40 Ram Island Road, the Tuthill House. This 1852 farmhouse was built by John Tuthill and remained in the family for a century, long surrounded by a 35-acre farm. Jim Dougherty, Town Supervisor, owns it now, and will be stationed outside the house during the race with a garden hose, cooling off runners as they crest the hill.

For 100 of its 163 years, the Tuthill family owned this house.

What goes up now goes down. As the course descends, the expansive view that John Tuthill coveted spreads out before you. If you are not experiencing any knee pain, you could also take this moment to appreciate the health of your iliotibial band.

At the bottom of the hill, the course veers left and uphill on Cobbetts Lane, but if you gaze ahead just before the turn, you see what was once called Factory Road, which ended at an industrial site that sustained the economic health of Shelter Island in the 19th century, the Menhaden Fish Factories. Menhaden is a tiny, oily fish that was cooked down in large cauldrons and used for fuel, fertilizer and for tarring nets. Back in the day, you could not only smell the fish cooking from where you are passing, but you could smell it over half the island.

Menhaden were cooked in kettles like this one in Dering Harbor

Now begins the first significant climb of the course. Cobbetts Lane climbs to the 2-mile mark, and near the crest of the hill on the right is a driveway, at 55 Cobbetts Lane to the Dering Farmhouse, one of the oldest homes on the Island. Built by Thomas and Mary Sylvester for their son, Henry Packer Dering between 1776-1782, it has a 60-foot wide, stone-lined well, one of a few such wells remaining on Long Island.

Passing the Dering House driveway, Cobbetts Lane curves up and flattens out into an allée of old oaks and maples starting with the white oak on the right just past Overlook Place, which is thought to be about 150 years old. These trees are reminder of the importance of Island timber to the barrel construction that was central to transporting goods by ship in the 18th and 19th century. Town Historian, Lilian Loper, (1872-1921) wrote, “ A line of old cherry trees marks the almost forgotten site on the South side of Cobbetts Lane of the barrel house.”

A right turn toward Dering Harbor leads through a flat area of dense woods, shady and cool. A right turn on Manhanset Road leads to an unexpected stretch of deep woods, a haven of shade and shelter that leads into Dering Harbor. This is the halfway point of the race.

A postcard sent by a lucky guest at the Manhanset House, shows off the extensive property. Courtesy of the Shelter Island Historical Society

At 3.5-miles the course turns sharply right, around the site of the Manhanset House, a hotel that in its 19th century heyday, was the epitome of the “Gay Nineties.” With rolling lawns, dining rooms, a ballroom and 2 hour direct train/boat service from New York City, it had all the services a visitor could want, including laundry, and it was likely in the laundry that the fire began that destroyed the resort in a spectacular conflagration in 1896. Rebuilt a year later, the hotel burned again in 1910 and was not replaced. The site is now a private home.

Four miles into the race a small body of water on the left called Julia Dyd Creek joins Dering Harbor on the right as the road dips to just above sea level. Mac Griswold, in her book, The Manor called it, “A poem of a place: woods, water, pasture, sheltered harbor for small craft.” This tidal creek is named for Julia Dyd, a house servant at Sylvester Manor her entire life, whose parents were enslaved there. She lived in a house nearby and died in 1907.

At 4.2-miles across the street from 54 Winthrop Rd a large boulder known as Sunset Rock sits on the edge of the water. Historian Ralph Duvall writes that the Native American Chief Pogatticutt, who used this rock as a throne, watched the sunset from atop the rock on the last day of his life, in 1654.

At the 4.4-mile mark, is a small bridge, called Second Bridge, because Shelter Island has only two. On the left across Gardiners Creek is Manhanset Neck, part of the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm property, and the site of an ancient Native American settlement. Very ancient. Even older that you may be feeling with almost two miles to go. Native Manhanset tribes established a small village here that predated the arrival of Nathaniel Sylvester in 1652 by at least one thousand years. The area looks today much as it did when it was a Neolithic colony, thanks to the fact that the land was owned, and ultimately conserved in perpetuity by the same family from 1652 to the present day.

Remains of ancient hunter-gatherer Native American settlements were found on Manhanset Neck in Gardiners Creek

From the bridge the next .4 miles is a tough stretch for tired legs as the course rises and then flattens out to a left, uphill turn onto North Ferry Road. The Case Homestead at 141 North Ferry Rd. is at 5-miles on the right. Best known as the Island’s first central telephone office, starting around 1911, live telephone operators physically “put through” the phone calls of Shelter Islanders with wires, before there were cell towers.

Just past the Case Homestead, the course jogs right and then left past the site of the Thornehaven Poultry Farm, visible behind a tall hedge. Where there was once poultry mayhem, there is now a lovely private home.

The chickens and eggs of Thornehaven Poultry Farm Photo courtesy of the Shelter Island Historical Society

The next mile is rolling, passing through Sachem’s Woods on the left. Just shy of the 6-mile mark, a left turn takes you to the finish area on .2-mile of pavement and then on the grass of Fiske Field to the finish line. Get ready to leave it all out there on the Field and make some of your own Shelter Island history.

For years, prevailing pre-race nutrition advice was to eat a high carbohydrate meal at dinner the night before. It was called carbo-loading, and often involved eating a gigantic serving of pasta. For me, those were the glory days of running.

Sadly, the practice of eating a large amount of high carbohydrate food the day before a race is out of favor, particularly before athletic events that last less than an hour. Current practice is a diet of moderate carbohydrate rich meals in the weeks leading up to a race, and easily digested carbohydrates and low fiber fruits, like bananas, peeled apples and juices on race day.

There is one real runner in my family, my husband, so I asked him for his best pre-race nutrition advice. Still haunted by his experience in the D.C. Cherry Blossom 10-mile Run in 2001, he said, “Do not eat at a Chinese restaurant the night before a big race.”

Fortunately for the Shelter Island 10K runners, that won’t be a problem, since there is not currently a Chinese restaurant on Shelter Island. But there are plenty of good alternatives.

Most races happen first thing in the morning; but our 10K starts at 5:30 p.m. That means pre-race eating includes breakfast and lunch.

“Poor runners, to have to run so late in the afternoon!” said Marie Eiffel, whose café (Marie Eiffel Market, 184 N. Ferry Rd. (631-749-0003) has beautiful and nutritious offerings for breakfast and lunch. Her farro, raisin, almond, and goat cheese salad tastes even better paired with a hunk of her signature baguette and the water-view from the picnic tables outback.

“We also do a lot of vegetables roasted or grilled for the runners, Marie said, “and of course fresh juices.” For something more substantial, pre-race pasta doesn’t get any better than Marie’s Pasta with pancetta, onions and black truffles. She also offers excellent homemade soups every day, including vegan, gluten-free mushroom, and a carrot ginger soup. Either would be a nutritious and easy-to-digest lunch for a runner.

Maria’s Kitchen, 55 North Ferry Road (631) 749-5450 is open 8am to 8pm for pre or post-race nutrition needs. Maria’s cooking is Mexican, but not spicy unless you ask for it. Her menu highlights fresh fruits and vegetables, and she makes juice from just about anything with a leaf or a stem. Her wraps are made with whole wheat; including one with grilled vegetables, greens, avocado and pesto, or the Shrimp Salad Wrap with fresh carrots, avocado, lettuce, corn, and lightly cooked shrimp that have a wonderful snap as you bite into them.

A good meal is important for recovery, and after 6.2 miles, a sit-down restaurant might be welcome. 18 Bay Ali Bevilacqua and Keith Bavaro run two such establishments, and they dish out some of the best food and welcoming ambiance on the Island.

Shelter Island House, 11 Stearns Point Rd. (631) 749-5659 has an upscale, pub feel. Keith suggested runners looking to re-up their carbs, and eat for recovery might go with the Chiocciole Pasta with Ricotta Salata, or the Chia Crusted Salmon.

Keith and Ali also run Salt, (631) 749-5535, at a lovely, waterfront location adjacent to the Island Boatyard Marina. The Linguini with steamed, local Little Neck clams is a mainstay of their innovative menu. They also make a great veggie burger, packed with protein and low fat carbohydrates, farro, oats, chickpeas, spinach, black beans and avocado.

Salt serves lunch and dinner and Shelter Island House will be open for dinner, and Sunday brunch for those still needing post-race replenishment. The 10K post-race party happens under the stars at Salt, with drinks and a band. Once you’ve had a good meal, you can dance all night.

06/08/2015

Peter Reich at home in a garage-like room that is equal parts office, boatyard, maritime museum and man-cave.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on June 4, 2015

When Peter Reich was 23 years old in 1980, he had an experience that usually lands a person on the morning talk shows.

Sailing his family’s 33-foot yacht Polar Bear, Peter and his friend Andy Reeve ran into a vicious storm. En route to Bermuda, the boat sank 750 miles off Montauk and left the two men floating in a tiny inflated raft for five days with eight slices of cheese, some ginger ale and a few signal flares.

The Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, or EPIRB, that should have broadcast their location, malfunctioned. They tried and failed to hail a passing freighter, only to learn later that it was likely the Poet, a vessel that went missing in the same late October storm and is believed to have gone down with all hands.

Finally they were picked up in “extremely exhausted condition” by the Polish freighter Ziemia Gdanska when the 2nd Officer saw their flare around 2 a.m. on October 31.

They had survived a storm that sank much larger vessels and took many lives. The waiting, said Peter, was the hardest part. “We didn’t know what was going to happen,” he remembered. “I wanted to know where I stood. I’m a bit of a control freak.”

Today Peter is a successful partner in Reich/Eklund Builders, a father, husband, three-term member of the Town Board, member of the Waterways Management Advisory Council and still a bit of a control freak.

In the early 1960s the Reich family began coming out to Shelter Island, the setting for Peter’s earliest and happiest experiences. Born in Brooklyn in 1957, he lived in a house in Bay Ridge where, almost 50 years later, his parents still live. But as far as he’s concerned, he grew up on Shelter Island.

The Reich family bought a house in Silver Beach in 1964 and sailing became the center of Peter’s life on the Island, with lessons at the Yacht Club among his most cherished childhood memories.

Peter’s parents, Daniel and Olive Reich, now in their 80s, are still in the thick of Island life and many of their friends were important to Peter in his childhood and beyond. One such friend was Hal McGee, former town councilman and his wife Jeanne, who were lifelong friends of the Reich family.

Peter told of the time his parents first met the McGees at a Yacht Club party in 1967, where the couples determined in two minutes of increasingly incredulous questions and answers, that the Reich and McGee clans lived in the same house in Brooklyn, number 36 on 79th street, about 15 years apart. Hal McGee had lived at number 36 in the 1940s, before the Reich family bought it in 1958.

“The same house in Bay Ridge produced two Shelter Island council members,” Peter said.

Another friend of the family and influence on Peter as he grew up was Walter Brigham, a sailor, craftsman and builder who mentored the young man. Peter remembers Walter as someone who could figure out how to do almost anything with his hands, preferring to work alone, rarely speaking in sentences of more than three words.

Peter said Walter’s legendary dislike of chatter led to a barroom bet on the odds of getting the silent man to utter a string of words. The bet resulted in a man named George stationing himself next to Walter at a remote fishing spot, where the following interaction allegedly took place.

George: “This is a gorgeous spot! Don’t you think? What a great view. What do you think of this spot? A beautiful place. This is a great spot, don’t you think?”

Walter Brigham: “Used to be.”

Peter attended Poly Prep in Brooklyn for middle and high school and SUNY Maritime in the Bronx for college.

He has lived full time on Shelter Island ever since. “The second I graduated, I was out the door,” he said. “This was already my legal address.”

Peter and his long-time friend and partner James Eklund run Reich/Eklund Construction, founded 30 years ago.

Peter married Susan Hawthorne and their 29-year-old daughter Melissa, who grew up on Shelter Island, attended Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon and now lives in Astoria, Oregon. She is stewardship director of the North Coast Land Conservancy. Peter and Susan divorced and she lives on Shelter Island.

Today Peter and his second wife, Loren, live in a 750-square-foot home above a garage-like room that is his office, hangout and display space. Holding an electronic object up for inspection, he said, “Here is the EPIRG that didn’t work. I still have it. Hard to believe.”

Asked if he minds living in such a small space, he said, “It’s like living on a very large boat.”

A shared interest in countertops first brought Loren and Peter together. She had hired Reich/Eklund to renovate her kitchen and called Peter for advice on materials. Coincidentally, Peter was himself choosing materials for a kitchen. “Our first date was looking at countertops in Southampton, then we had lunch,” Peter said.

On the day of his afternoon wedding to Loren, Peter decided to go parasailing in the morning. His soon-to-be bride demonstrated tolerance when asked what she thought of the wedding-day parasailing. According to Peter, she said, “If he breaks his leg, he’ll be there on crutches.”

Initially motivated by frustration with the permitting process for wetlands applications taking “ludicrous amounts of time,” Peter got involved in town government. He began by serving on the Waterways Management Advisory Council, helping to streamline the application process. In 2004, he was elected to the Town Board. He’s reaching the end of his third term, having been reelected in 2008 and 2012.

In the fall of 2013, Peter was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma after weeks of misdiagnosis and steadily worsening health. Doctors at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City eventually made the diagnosis and started him on a chemotherapy regime that lasted into early 2014 and halted his illness.

In April of that year, Peter endured a bone marrow transplant, including 100 days of isolation, no minor thing for a gregarious man. A year and a half out from his ordeal, he’s feeling good, and advising friends that Shelter Island is a great place to live, but “If you get bad sick, head for the city.”

A few years back, Peter built a 16.5-foot rowboat, a front-rowing vessel that stays in the water all year round. “Six years in a row Loren and I went for a Christmas morning ‘Santa Row,’” he said. “We’d put on our Santa hats and drop off presents at our neighbors on the creek.”

Currently, Peter is entranced with a wooden boat called a Caledonia yawl. He and Andy Reeve will spend part of August in a coastal sailing course, to test the handling of the boat before committing the time and effort to building one.

If being lost at sea for five days in 1980 diminished Peter’s enthusiasm for boating, it doesn’t show. “The water has a lot to do with why I love Shelter Island,” he said. “I’m not here for golf.”

06/05/2015

My husband and I rarely go to dinner parties. Most Saturday nights, I cook something, my husband does the dishes, we read a little and, if we’re feeling really frisky, we might stay up to watch the first 20 minutes of SNL.

We’re not antisocial, so when one night in April, a couple we like very much invited us to dinner along with another couple, we happily changed our routine. I even traded my T-shirt for a blouse, right in the middle of the weekend. I think my husband may have shaved.

We parked in front of the house at the same time as the other couple, introduced ourselves to each other and arrived en masse at our hosts’ door announcing, “The party is here!” as we crossed the threshold. But something was amiss.

Our attractive hostess, with a mane of soft, brown, curly hair, looked up at the sound of our voices across the kitchen, her eyewear askew and her apron coming untied. This was not like her. Our host greeted us the way a pilot doing a visual inspection of wing flaps might greet passengers in the exit row; a quick nod and he disappeared down the basement steps.

“We have a leak,” said our hostess, “it started a few minutes ago … we’ve had to turn off all the water.”

By now, our host had climbed back up the stairs to report that there was an inch of water in the basement.

It was 7:15 p.m., the night before Easter Sunday. “We called the plumber and he said he’d come right over,” our hostess said. Surely she was dreaming. What plumber would interrupt his holiday weekend to save the dinner of victims of corroded pipes?

The answer to my question, and the host and hostess’s prayers, rang the bell. The silhouette of a tall, handsome man in work clothes filled the door. “You have a leak?” he asked “Where am I going?”

As the host and the plumber descended to the basement, I saw a curtain of blue smoke escaping from the top and sides of the oven door, curling over the exhaust hood and flattening against the ceiling. “Is there something in the oven?” I ventured timidly.

The hostess opened the oven, and the curtain of smoke thickened into a blue wave that cleared long enough to reveal two earthenware pots bubbling over, spilling their contents onto the red hot floor of the stove. She closed the oven door for a moment to strategize, just as the smoke alarm went off.

The wail of the smoke detector throbbed through the house, soon accompanied by the frantic, scrabbling sound of toenails against linoleum —clickety, clickety, click. It was the gentle, elderly spaniel of the house, trying to apprehend the feral creature he believed to be the source of the shrill bleat from underneath the refrigerator where he thought it hid.

Alas, the piercing noise was not a muskrat under the fridge. It was a fully charged alarm with its electronically generated warning of danger, and it was hanging about 15 feet up on a wall above us. It had to be stopped.

Hoping to be of some use, I waved a fan of folded newspaper in the direction of the alarm, while the others took turns swatting at it with a broomstick. It would not die.

With our hostess employing fire suppression techniques in the kitchen, the host appeared with a ladder, unfolded it below the shrieking alarm, mounted and armed with the broom, began grimly walloping the beige disk like a combatant in a death match. The male half of the other couple spelled our host on the ladder, taking a few choice licks with the broom handle, until the alarm was dislodged and the battery fell out.

The sudden silence was so unexpected and so welcome that the clickety-click of the dog’s toenails on the kitchen floor seemed musical by comparison. He stopped digging and took up a spot by the basement door, keeping a wary eye on the room lest the creature return.

Our hostess stabilized the conflagration in the oven, the plumber replaced a valve and turned the water on, and it was 7:45, time for hors d’oeuvres.

In the aftermath, we all had a drink, even the two of us who did not usually touch the stuff.

The braised chicken that came out of those overflowing casseroles was delicious, thanks to the steely nerves — and the insulated potholders of our hostess, who saved dinner from the fire.

The next day, I heard that these good people were able to dry the basement floor, air out the house and remove the singe marks from the cabinets. The smoke detector can be replaced, and even the dog may recover his equilibrium with some really good treats. But it’s hard to imagine our hosts will have another dinner party anytime soon. And who could blame them?

06/01/2015

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTOKurt Ericksen at the Sylvester Manor farmstand where the first spring crops are already on offer.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on May 28, 2015

After college and a tour of service in the United States Coast Guard, Kurt Ericksen turned to a profession that drew upon his unusual skill set: experience with environmental regulations and policy, a willingness to get extremely dirty and sangfroid. He became a farmer.

It’s not that managing hazardous situations enticed Kurt to Sylvester Manor, although statistically, farming is among the most dangerous professions. But his Coast Guard experience with exploding cargo and oil spills has come in handy. “When things on the farm happen that people think are dramatic, I’m O.K.,” he said.

Kurt grew up “on the skiing and snowboarding slopes” in Arlington, Vermont, a town of 2,500. His parents still live in Arlington, where his mother is a social worker and his father a facilities engineer.

Kurt enlisted in the Coast Guard in 2007. Trained as a marine science technician, he was stationed in New York City doing pollution prevention and response, when he was called to a distressed cargo ship in New York Harbor.

The Sichem Defiance, a 443-foot tanker loaded with extremely explosive compressed gas, blew a tank, causing the cargo to shift and the ship to list. Kurt and a co-worker were first responders and spent 14 hours on the vessel, monitoring tank and pressure levels until the situation was stabilized and barges brought in to offload the cargo safely.

In 2010, Kurt deployed to the Gulf of Mexico as part of the Coast Guard response to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill catastrophe. His team monitored a section of the huge spill area, taking samples and assessing the source of oil sheens that appeared in the water.

The government regulators, BP officials, environmental groups and university researchers on the spill site had diverse and potentially conflicting agendas, but Kurt was impressed at the high level of cooperation.

“There was a common goal,” he said. “Trying to determine what the best resources were, how they were best utilized. Definitely an eye opener.”

After leaving the Coast Guard in 2011, Kurt went back to school at Brooklyn College, where he studied environmental science. There he learned that “it’s hard to be interested in environmental policy and not be interested in agricultural policy.”

In his early 30s, Kurt began to think about farming. “I started late,” he said. “I had enough experiences and enough conviction that I knew this is what I wanted to do.”

In 2013, Kurt was accepted at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture for an apprenticeship program. The Center is an educational farm famous in the progressive food world, largely due to Stone Barns and Blue Hill restaurants and Chef Dan Barber.

“That was funny, because I was not into the food industry at all,” Kurt said. “I wasn’t familiar with it. I had friends who, when they found out I was going to start farming at this place, said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s the most magical place’ but I had not heard of it until a month before.”

In 2014, Kurt went to Clear Brook, a large, successful farm near his hometown in Vermont, running a crew doing organic vegetable production on cultivated acreage 10 times the size of the Sylvester Manor farm. “Sort of takes pace to a whole new level when you are working on that scale,” he said.

Kurt also worked at Four Season Farm in Maine with farming legend Eliot Coleman, the man whose 1989 book, “The New Organic Grower,” is still considered a Bible of farming. Kurt worked on Coleman’s farm during the 2014 winter growing season, a period of record lows and the most snowfall in 50 years. Coleman told Kurt: “It’s safe to say that you farmed in Maine in worse weather than I ever did.”

Kurt and his girlfriend, Maggie Higby, met at Clear Brook Farm. When he came to Sylvester Manor to assume the title “vegetable grower,” Maggie, who also had a substantial farming résumé, came to Sylvester Manor as a “farm apprentice.”

In early March, Kurt, Maggie and their dog, Desmond, made the move from Vermont. Kurt figured since he came from a town the same size with a similar tendency to grow in population dramatically in the high season (skiers), Shelter Island would seem like home.

So far, so good, he said. He’s looking forward to doing some fishing and in the fall, hunting. Maggie, Desmond and Kurt have a small apartment near the school and Desmond established his good manners on the farm. “He knows to stay out of the vegetables,” Kurt said. “When I bring him out he just goes under the truck and falls asleep.”

A few changes in the vegetable offerings at Sylvester Manor Farm this year reflect Kurt’s influence, most importantly, the addition of salad mixes and increase in lettuces. Then there’s a new carrot variety — Mokum — that Kurt is excited about. “I grew this variety at Stone Barns,” he said. “It is a super sweet orange carrot. It’s all about taste.”

He hopes to engage more Islanders in the farm. Even if they’re visiting the chickens and goats and don’t shop at the farmstand or eat the food, his hope is that they’ll learn how their food is produced and what’s in it. The slogan is, “The goal is to put the culture back in agriculture.”

The desire to teach, to learn and be part of a community brought Kurt to farming at the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm. His measures of success? “Fertile land, dirty hands, sweat and smiles.”